the second gap
wrote about 'closing the gap' recently. A nod to Ira Glass' point about the space that arises between your taste and your capabilities. Between what you consume and what you produce. Between where you are and where you aspire to be.It takes a lifetime of slow work to find a rhythm of thinking which reflects and articulates the uniqueness of your soul.
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
A maker will always experience a disjuncture between their discernment and their skills. But, sometimes the 'gap' is more complicated. At least, it has been for me. Sometimes there's not just one gap, but two.
I look around at the art I admire. The artists I'm in awe of. The makers who regularly inspire me. Those past and present. The ones who came before and the ones more contemporary. The shoulders of giants and those of my peers. I look at their work and I look at mine. All I see are the differences. The starkness. The disparities. What theirs is and what I wish mine could be.
There's the divide that closes as you grow, as you improve. As you commit yourself to practice and discipline. As you give yourself over to the effort of iteration and constancy.
But, then there's another gap whose closure is predicated on compassion and faith. Faith in your work. Faith in your processes. And, the compassion you give yourself no matter what happens. No matter how things turn out. No matter how different things are compared to how you imagined they'd be.
Sometimes in learning how to make work you love, you have to learn how to love the work you make.
Closing the first gap is a process of development.
Closing the second is an act of grace.
The second is proving to be much harder for me.
P.S. ICAD Day 153 - 156
P.P.S. - On Friday I got the news that I received the Bronze award in the Series Category of the Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards. I’m beyond baffled and honored to be amongst so many incredible artists that I continue to look up to.
Yeah, there's always that concern. Part of what I try to keep in mind about our heroes is that there's some meta-messaging going on with their work that isn't present with ours: if they're well-known, it's impossible to interact with their work without also being told how important it is.
For example, I like a lot of Coleridge's poetry. But in order to read it, I have to buy a paperback littered with blurbs about his monumental contributions to the English canon, massive critical introductions to his poetry and then exhaustive footnotes about where he was and what he was doing when he wrote every line. Quite obviously, no one's doing that with my own writing and it can create a false impression that I must therefore be terrible.
So what I do instead is try to act as a peer to my heroes through my process. I don't focus on how their work is packaged and marketed to me, I remind myself that they, too, were at a desk, writing one line at a time. I try to dedicate time to that, do the best I can do, and let everything else be whatever it's going to be.
The only way to close the gap is by doing the work and learning from it, which requires ignoring the gap's existence.
It’s difficult for us to assess the true value of our work and skills objectively, especially when we're so weighed down by personal biases and distortions—a process that is likely exacerbated by depressed mood. This idea reminds me of a quote I recently encountered on Austin Kleon's blog: “Creative work is very hard,” wrote Sidney Lumet in Making Movies, “and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”
Many congratulations on the Bronze Award - so good to see your work getting the recognition it deserves (although Gold would have been more fitting!). Keep going!